psychology

#575 J. Michael Bailey: Sexual Orientation, Sexual Arousal, and Gender Identity

Jan 17, 2022

Dr. J. Michael Bailey is an American psychologist, behavioral geneticist, and professor at Northwestern University. His interests include sexual orientation, gender nonconformity, sexual arousal, behavior genetics, and evolutionary psychology. He maintains that sexual orientation is heavily influenced by biology and male homosexuality is most likely inborn. Dr. Bailey wrote The Man Who Would Be Queen, a book intended to explain the biology of male sexual orientation and gender to a general audience, focusing on gender nonconforming boys, gay men and male-to-female transsexuals. More»
#574 Andreas Jungherr: Online Political Discourse, Digital Media and Politics, and Misinformation

Jan 14, 2022

Dr. Andreas Jungherr is Professor for Political Science with a focus on the Governance of Complex and Innovative Technical Systems at Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg. He examines the impact of digital media on politics and society. He has worked on the uses of digital media and technology by publics, political actors, and organizations in international comparison. He also addresses challenges for scientific research in reaction to digital change in order to realize opportunities emerging from new data sources and analytical approaches. In this, he has focused on harnessing the potential of digital methods and computational social science while addressing methodological challenges in its integration into the social sciences. He is the author of books like Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy, and Analyzing Political Communication with Digital Trace Data: The Role of Twitter Messages in Social Science Research. More»
#573 Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington: Evolutionary Psychology, Political Ideology, and Social Inequality

Jan 13, 2022

Dr. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a social psychologist interested in the mechanisms underlying our human sensitivity to power, status, and group membership: their origins, interactions, and manifestation in societal context. More»
#569 Andrew Thomas: Ovulation, Mate Preferences, and Mating Strategies

Jan 3, 2022

Dr. Andrew Thomas is a Lecturer in Psychology at Swansea University, UK. His research is concerned with the differences in mating strategies within and between the sexes. This includes environmental and social factors which contribute to this variance and whether mating preferences themselves are reactive to environmental changes over short-term periods. He also has a secondary interest in cyber-psychology and online interaction; particularly how one represents oneself using internet avatars and aliases. More»
#566 Joel Paris: The Current State of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

Dec 27, 2021

Dr. Joel Paris is Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University, and Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Sir Mortimer B. Davis-Jewish General Hospital. His research interests include developmental factors in personality disorders (especially borderline personality), and culture and personality. He’s the author of many books, including An Evidence-Based Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Fall of an Icon: Psychoanalysis and Academic Psychiatry, and Fads and Fallacies in Psychiatry. More»
#563 Robert Brooks Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers

Dec 20, 2021

Dr. Robert Brooks is Professor of Evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He studies the evolution of mate choice, the costs of being attractive, sexual conflict, the reason animals age and the links between sex, diet, obesity and death. He is the author of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll: How Evolution has Shaped the Modern World, and, more recently, Artificial Intimacy: Virtual Friends, Digital Lovers, and Algorithmic Matchmakers. More»
#558 Justin Barrett - Thriving with Stone Age Minds; Evo Psych, Christian Faith, and Flourishing

Dec 9, 2021

Dr. Justin L. Barrett is founder and president of Blueprint 1543 and adjunct professor of psychology at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he was formerly director of the Thrive Center and chief project developer for Science, Theology, and Religion Initiatives. His new book is Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing. More»
#557 Stephen Fleming - Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness

Dec 6, 2021

Dr. Stephen Fleming is Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging where he leads the Metacognition Group, at University College London. The question that drives most his research is: what supports the remarkable capacity for human self-awareness? To address this question, he combines experimental and theoretical approaches (psychophysics, computational modelling, neuroimaging) to understand how people become self-aware of aspects of their cognition and behavior (such as perception, memory and decision-making), and why such awareness is often impaired in psychiatric and neurological disorders. Current interests focus on understanding contributions of human prefrontal cortex to metacognition, and how self-awareness and social cognition may share a core neurocomputational basis. He is the author of Know Thyself: The New Science of Self-Awareness. More»
#556 Dan Sperber: Culture, Cultural Attraction Theory, Epistemic Vigilance, and Reason

Dec 3, 2021

Dr. Dan Sperber is a researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod, and a professor in cognitive science and philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. He is Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and member of the Academia Europaea. He has been the first laureate of the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009. He is the author of numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology and of several books, including Meaning and Relevance (with Deirdre Wilson), Relevance: Communication and Cognition (with Deirdre Wilson), and The Enigma of Reason (with Hugo Mercier). More»
#554 Felipe De Brigard: Memory, Imagination, and Free Will

Nov 29, 2021

Dr. Felipe De Brigard is Fuchsberg-Levine Family Associate Professor at Duke University. Most of his research focuses on the way in which memory and imagination interact. So far, he has explored ways in which episodic memory both guides and constrains episodic counterfactual thinking (i.e., thoughts about alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred), and how this interaction affects the perceived plausibility of imagined counterfactual events. He also explores the differential contribution of episodic and semantic memory in the generation of different kinds of counterfactual simulations, as well as the effect of counterfactual thinking on the memories they derive from. In addition, his research attempts to understand how prior experience helps to constrain the way in which we reconstruct episodic memories. Finally, he is also interested in the role of internal attention during conscious recollection. More»